The Coptic script is the script used for writing the Coptic language, the most recent development of Egyptian. The repertoire of glyphs is based on the uncial Greek alphabet, augmented by letters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic. It was the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language. There are several Coptic alphabets, as the script varies greatly among the various dialects and eras of the Coptic language.
History
The Coptic script has a long history going back to the Ptolemaic Kingdom, when the Greek alphabet was used to transcribe Demotic texts, with the aim of recording the correct pronunciation of Demotic. As early as the sixth century BC and as late as the second century AD, an entire series of pre-Christian religious texts were written in what scholars term Old Coptic, Egyptian language texts written in the Greek alphabet.
In contrast to Old Coptic, seven additional Coptic letters were derived from Demotic, and many of these (though not all) are used in “true” form of Coptic writing. Coptic texts are associated with Christianity, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism.
With the spread of early Christianity in Egypt, knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphs was lost by the late third century, as well as Demotic script slightly later, making way for a writing system more closely associated with the Coptic Orthodox Church. By the fourth century, the Coptic script was "standardized", particularly for the Sahidic dialect. (There are a number of differences between the alphabets as used in the various dialects in Coptic).
Coptic is not generally used today except by the members of the Coptic Orthodox Church to write their religious texts. All the Gnostic codices found at Nag Hammadi used the Coptic script.
The most common Coptic dialect written today as a liturgical language for the Coptic Orthodox and Coptic Catholic Churches is the Bohairic dialect.
The Old Nubian alphabet—used to write Old Nubian, a Nilo-Saharan language—is an uncial variant of the Coptic script, with additional characters borrowed from the Greek and Meroitic scripts.
Form The Coptic script was the first Egyptian writing system to indicate vowels, making Coptic documents invaluable for the interpretation of earlier Egyptian texts. Some Egyptian syllables had sonorants but no vowels; in Sahidic, these were written in Coptic with a line above the entire syllable. Various scribal schools made limited use of diacritics: some used an apostrophe as a word divider and to mark clitics, a function of determinatives in logographic Egyptian; others used diereses over and to show that these started a new syllable, others a circumflex over any vowel for the same purpose.Ritner, Robert Kriech. 1996. "The Coptic Alphabet". In The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1994:287–290.
The Coptic script's glyphs are largely based on the Greek alphabet, which is another help in interpreting older Egyptian texts.Campbell, George L. "Coptic." Compendium of the World's Writing Systems. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Biddles LTD, 1991. 415. It has 24 letters of Greek origin; 6 or 7 more were retained from Demotic, depending on the dialect (6 in Sahidic, another each in Bohairic and Akhmimic). In addition to the alphabetic letters, the letter ϯ stood for the syllable or .
As the Coptic script is a variant of the Greek alphabet, with a few added letters, it can be used to write Greek without any transliteration schemes. Latin equivalents would include the Icelandic alphabet (which likewise has added letters), or the Fraktur alphabet (which has distinctive forms). While initially unified with the Greek alphabet by Unicode, a proposal was later accepted to separate it, with the proposal noting that Coptic is never written using modern Greek letter-forms (unlike German, which may be written with Fraktur or Antiqua letter-forms), and that the Coptic letter-forms have closer mutual legibility with the Greek-based letters incorporated into the separately encoded Cyrillic alphabet than with the forms used in modern Greek. Because Coptic lowercases are usually small-caps forms of the capitals, a Greek would have little trouble reading Coptic letters, but Copts would struggle more with many of the Greek letters.For example: The composer's name "Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich" is Дмитрий Дмитриевич Шостакович in Cyrillic, and Ⲇⲙⲏⲧⲣⲓⲓ Ⲇⲙⲏⲧⲣⲓⲉⲃⲓϭ Ϣⲟⲥⲧⲁⲕⲟⲃⲓϭ in Coptic.
Letters These are the letters that are used for writing the Coptic language. Coptic did not originally have case distinctions—they are a modern convention, as is the case with other classical languages like Latin.
Uppercase (image) Lowercase (image) Uppercase (unicode) Lowercase (unicode) Numeric value Greek Sahidic Bohairic Late Coptic Before the Greco-Bohairic reforms of the mid 19th century. Greco-Bohairic 1 Α, α A, a , 2 Β, β B, b (final ) (final ) seemed to have retained a intervocalically in Late Coptic. , ( before a consonant, at the end of a word, or in a name) 3 Γ, γ G, g (marked Greek words)— , ( before ⲁ, ⲟ, or ⲱ) , (before or ), (before or ) 4 Δ, δ D, d (marked Greek words)— (marked Greek words) , ( in a name) 5 Ε, ε E, e , ( = , ) , ( = ) , ( = ) 6 Ϛ, ϛ(, ) (none)(none) 7 Ζ, ζ Z, z (marked Greek words)— (marked Greek words) 8 Η, η Ē, ē , , 9 Θ, θ Th, th 10 Ι, ι I, i , , , ( = ) , ( = ) , (before vowels), (after vowels to form diphthongs) 20 Κ, κ K, k 30 Λ, λ L, l 40 Μ, μ M, m 50 Ν, ν N, n 60 Ξ, ξ Ks, ks(only in Greek loanwords) , (usually following a consonant, or sometimes when starting a word) 70 Ο, ο O, o ( = , ) ( = , ) ( = ) 80 Π, π P, p 100 Ρ, ρ R, r ~ 200 Σ, σ, ς S, s 300 Τ, τ T, t (final ) 400 Υ, υ U, u ( = , ) , ( = , ) , (between "" and another vowel except ""), (after ( or ()), (digraph "") 500 Φ, φ Ph, ph ~ 600 Χ, χ Kh, kh (if the word is Coptic in origin), (if the word is Greek in origin), (if the word is Greek in origin but before or ) 700 Ψ, ψ Ps, ps (only in Greek loanwords) , (usually following a consonant) 800 Ω, ω Ō, ō — (none) Š, š / Sh, sh 90Ϙ, ϙ(numerical value) F, f — (none) X, x / H̱, ẖ NA — (none) only used in Akhmimic for . No name is recorded.— (none) H, h — (none) J, j and seemed to have merged in Late Coptic into one phoneme, , with intervocalically. , (before or )—(none) C, c / Č, č , (usually following a consonant)— Τι, τι Ti, ti When part of the digraph , it is pronounced in Bohairic. 900Ϡ, ϡ(numerical value)(none)(none)
Letters derived from Demotic Old Coptic had a large number of Demotic Egyptian characters, including some logograms. This was reduced to seven such characters, used for sounds not covered by the Greek alphabet (plus their modern lowercase forms):
Hieroglyph Hieratic Demotic Coptic Late Coptic SA\ → → → f\ → → → M12\ → → → F18\:Y1\ → → → U29\ → → → k\ → → → D37\:t\ → → →
Numerals Coptic numerals are an alphabetic numeral system in which numbers are indicated with letters of the alphabet, such as for 500. The numerical value of the letters is based on Greek numerals. Sometimes numerical use is distinguished from text with a continuous overline above the letters, as with Greek and Cyrillic numerals.
Sample text Below is the Lord's prayer in the Coptic language and script:
Unicode
In Unicode, most Coptic letters formerly shared codepoints with similar Greek letters, but a disunification was accepted for version 4.1, which appeared in 2005. The new Coptic block is U+2C80 to U+2CFF. Most fonts contained in mainstream operating systems use a distinctive Byzantine style for this block. The Greek block includes seven Coptic letters (U+03E2–U+03EF highlighted below) derived from Demotic, and these need to be included in any complete implementation of Coptic.
Diacritics and punctuation
These are also included in the Unicode specification.
Punctuation Latin alphabet punctuation (comma, period, question mark, semicolon, colon, hyphen) uses the regular Unicode codepoints for punctuation Dicolon: standard colon U+003A Middle dot: U+00B7 En dash: U+2013 Em dash: U+2014 Slanted double hyphen: U+2E17
Combining diacritics
These are codepoints applied after that of the character they modify.
Combining overstroke: U+0305 (= supralinear stroke) Combining character-joining overstroke (from middle of one character to middle of the next): U+035E Combining dot under a letter: U+0323 Combining dot over a letter: U+0307 Combining acute accent: U+0301 Combining grave accent: U+0300 Combining circumflex accent (caret shaped): U+0302 Combining circumflex (curved shape) or inverted breve above: U+0311 Combining circumflex as wide inverted breve above joining two letters: U+0361 Combining diaeresis: U+0308
Macrons and overlines
Coptic uses to indicate syllabic consonants, for example .
Coptic abbreviations use to draw a continuous line across the remaining letters of an abbreviated word. It extends from the left edge of the first letter to the right edge of the last letter. For example, , a common abbreviation for 'spirit'.
A different kind of overline uses , , and to distinguish the spelling of certain common words or to highlight proper names of divinities and heroes. For this the line begins in the middle of the first letter and continues to the middle of the last letter. A few examples: , , .
Sometimes numerical use of letters is indicated with a continuous line above them using as in for 1,888 (where "" is 1,000 and "" is 888). Multiples of 1,000 can be indicated by a continuous double line above using as in for 1,000.
See also Coptic pronunciation reform Institute of Coptic Studies
References
Quaegebeur, Jan. 1982. "De la préhistoire de l'écriture copte." Orientalia lovaniensia analecta 13:125–136. Kasser, Rodolphe. 1991. "Alphabet in Coptic, Greek". In The Coptic Encyclopedia, edited by Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Volume 8. 30–32. Kasser, Rodolphe. 1991. "Alphabets, Coptic". In The Coptic Encyclopedia, edited by Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Volume 8. 32–41. Kasser, Rodolphe. 1991. "Alphabets, Old Coptic". In The Coptic Encyclopedia, edited by Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, Volume 8. 41–45. Wolfgang Kosack: Koptisches Handlexikon des Bohairischen. Koptisch – Deutsch – Arabisch. Verlag Christoph Brunner, Basel 2013, .
External links
Michael Everson's Revised proposal to add the Coptic alphabet to the BMP of the UCS Final Proposal to Encode Coptic Epact Numbers in ISO/IEC 1064 Copticsounds – a resource for the study of Coptic phonology Phonological overview of the Coptic alphabet in comparison to classical and modern Greek. Coptic Unicode input Michael Everson's Antinoou: A standard font for Coptic supported by the International Association for Coptic Studies. Ifao N Copte – A professional Coptic font for researchers, students and publishers has been developed by the French institute of oriental archeology (IFAO). Unicode, Mac and Windows compatible, this free font is available through downloading from the IFAO website (direct link). Coptic fonts; Coptic fonts made by Laurent Bourcellier & Jonathan Perez, type designers : Coptic font support – how to install, use and manipulate Coptic ASCII and Unicode fonts Download Free Coptic Fonts The Coptic Alphabet (omniglot.com) GNU FreeFont Coptic range in serif face